By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
During a flight to Rome in mid-September 2024, a journalist asked Pope Francis what advice he had about the upcoming United States presidential election. The reporter told the pope that American Catholic voters faced a choice between “a candidate who supports ending a pregnancy and another who wants to deport 11 million migrants.”
Based on news accounts, the pope responded, “Both are against life: the one that throws out migrants and the one that kills children. Both are against life. I can’t decide; I’m not American and won’t go to vote there. But let it be clear: denying migrants the ability to work and receive hospitality is a sin, a grave sin.”
Pope Francis continued, “One must choose the lesser of two evils. Who is the lesser of two evils, that lady or that gentleman, I do not know.”
It’s been interesting watching Catholics interpret the pope’s “advice” and try to navigate the so-called choice between the “lesser” of two “evils.” This includes Utah Catholics, reported by The Salt Lake Tribune.
Current polls show Catholics about evenly split between major party candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. According to some news reports, a “real divide exists among American Catholic voters.”
I don’t know for certain, but my educated guess of the people I know is that there are Catholics/priests/monks/nuns who will vote for Trump. There also, however, are Catholics/priests/monks/nuns who will vote for Harris.
A ‘progressive’ Catholic newspaper (The National Catholic Reporter) recently published several letters from its readers with reactions to what the pope said.) Here is a sampling.
“Please do not make the U.S. election a single issue election about abortion. Our entire democratic system of government is at stake…”
“The Pope made a very poor judgment by equating the former President—who has based his whole identity and campaign on maligning immigrants and has stated his plans for mass arrests and the deportation of 11 million persons—with the Vice President who is not advocating abortion but instead a woman’s moral agency.”
“This [abortion] is a subject ONLY a woman, her conscience, her family and doctor should make. The rest of us need to just mind our own damn business.”
Reactions from a more ‘traditional’ Catholic newspaper (The National Catholic Register) were interesting too, and different. The Register has published a detailed election guide for its readers, found here.
One National Catholic Register commentator may have revealed his preferred candidate by noting that the United States Catholic Bishops “continue to describe the threat of abortion as ‘our preeminent priority because it directly attacks our most vulnerable and voiceless brothers and sisters and destroys more than a million lives per year in our country alone.’”
The National Catholic Reporter has noted the bishops’ position too, and suggested that the pope’s recent comments probably put him at odds with them. That’s true, and not very helpful to Catholics in the pews.
At least one Catholic thinks neither 2024 presidential candidate is the lesser of two evils. That writer recently asserted neither Trump nor Harris take positions consistent with Catholic teaching on important issues like maintenance of a nuclear arsenal, the wars in Gaza or the Ukraine, world-wide starvation, climate change, and “many other life issues.”
It seems the pope’s admonition on voting has led to several different conclusions. Why?
Longtime Vatican reporter John Allen proposes a reasonably good explanation. He says that Catholics are “politically homeless.”
Allen explains, “Granted, there are enthusiasts on either side of our partisan divides who probably don’t see things in those terms, but Pope Francis’s way of sizing up the situation nevertheless will resonate with a vast swath of Americans, of all religious faiths and none, who simply can’t get into a full, upright and locked position in favor of either alternative.”
This makes some sense.
Most Catholics see life as a seamless fabric, one that stretches from the point of conception to the moment of death. Major political parties today struggle to address that full fabric, and politicians often seem to focus on one side of it to the exclusion of the other.
There may be other explanations too.
When I vote, I remember that I am a Catholic, of course. I also consider, however, that I am a husband, father, grandfather, lawyer, writer, business owner, older worker, almost-retiree, suburb dweller, homeowner, taxpayer, descendent of Irish immigrants (some illegal), a Utahn, and an American too, among other things.
The first Catholic president of the United States—John F. Kennedy—faced lots of questions about his possible fealty to the pope when he ran for president back in 1960, a year before I was born.
In a famous speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Kennedy said he was an American running for president who also just happened to be Catholic. He was not running as—and if elected would not govern as—a surrogate of the pope or his bishops.
JFK explained, “For voters are more than Catholics, Protestants or Jews. They make up their minds for many diverse reasons, good and bad.”
At the end of the day, my guess is that most American Catholics will use the pope’s admonition to “choose the lesser evil” as a green light to vote whichever way they were leaning towards voting already.
For many diverse reasons, good and bad, the lesser evil may well be in the eye of the beholder.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
